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Old 06-11-2009, 11:12 AM   #24 (permalink)
technologist

 
Member Since: Mar 30, 2004
Location: USA
Posts: 3,893
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aptmunich View Post
With all multithreading optimizations GCD is set to offer and the general focus on optimization (which can be partially achieved by writing code that can target specific processor features), supporting PowerPC would have definitely been quite non-trivial. Sure they could have done it, but in a release that prioritized streamlining the code base, it doesn't really make sense.
To the degree that features need to be optimized for a specific instruction set, yes. But there should be* nothing about Grand Central (or multicore programming in general) that is specific to any ISA. Grand Central is just an abstraction layer for fundamental programming techniques which are the same regardless of whether the cores in question are PowerPC, Intel, or SPARC.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lifeisabeach View Post
I just stumbled across an interesting article that details why support for PPC was dropped from Snow Leopard.
Myths of Snow Leopard 2: 32-bit Support — RoughlyDrafted Magazine
According to the information Apple is distributing now, Snow Leopard is supported even on 32-bit Intel machines, so this doesn't really make sense.
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